Recent (Re)Reading

March 28, 2011

Back in the mid-90s I self-published a book "Dearest Sattie: Civil War Letters of Capt. Charles Oren, 5th USCT", which as you might suspect from the title is the war correspondence of an ancestor, who was an officer of black troops KIA at Petersburg. It found its way into the bibliography of at least one work on related topics, and as a result about once a year someone tracks me down looking for a copy. The original stock has been exhausted long ago, but thanks the advent of net-based publishing, I've now got it back in print in a new edition, including two additional letters and further family and historical background. So once the Google crawler comes through here again, there's an answer to the question of how to get a copy of "Dearest Sattie":

November 02, 2010

October 25, 2010

Thanks to the good folks at Cubachi, I found out about PBS' scheduled airing of the BBC's reinterpretation of Conan Doyle's great detective, Sherlock Holmes, just in time to catch its first West Coast showing. I was quite prepared to hate it. As a long time fan of the original canon, one who regards the early Jeremy Brett portrayals as definitive, the notion of modernist reinterpretations (even those set in Victorian times) makes me twitchy. Instead, I adored "Sherlock".

The one word for this version of the canon is 'wit'. Not too surprising, since its producers - Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis - are doing double time from managing the current version of the venerable "Dr. Who" franchise (where they labor under the shadow of Tom Baker). The current Holmes version pays due homage to the original, from the obvious (the initial title "A Study in Pink" borrowed from the "Study in Scarlet" novella, along with several of its plot points, the note perfect first Watson/Holmes encounter) to the subtle (the murderous cabbie is no longer an American, but his innocent and bemused passenger is). For those familiar with the canon, "Sherlock" makes great play with things in common with Victorian times (Afghan wars, the maze of London) and those in contrast (the optics of two single men living together, drug related mores). Watch for Holmes' deductions to run aground on "Harry".

Moffat and Gattis also amuse by importing tropes of modern suspense and action. We have the obligatory scene in a deserted parking garage, plenty of crime scene tape, and mad dashes through traffic. If there's risk here, it's in too liberal quoting from current culture, particularly technology. Blogs, mobiles, notebook computers and GPS, it's all there, and could feel very dated in ten years. On the other hand, the blur of 120 years conceals the reality that Conan Doyle did the same. Submarines, telephones, the complexities of the railway timetables, and the latest pop psychology were all pressed into service to keep the Victorian readers of The Strand engaged enough to miss the often enormous plot holes in the canon. "Sherlock" recapitulates both the holes and the contemporary references, and is a fitting tribute to the original. It will be very interesting to see what sort of historical patina it may accumulate in 30 or so years.

"The board decided that we ought to sell Apple. So I was given the assignment to go off and try to sell Apple in 1993. So I went off and tried to sell it to AT&T to IBM and other people. We couldn’t get anyone who wanted to buy it. They thought it was just too high risk because Microsoft and Intel were doing well then."

At the time, I was involved with the ill-fated Kaleida, one of the IBM/Apple joint ventures. And I had my own theories about the meaning of some of more off-center or squirrelly goings-on in the Kaleida board, at meetings with IBM, and in the related office politics. That quote suddenly snapped things into focus: I, Kaleida, and the equally ill-fated Taligent were part of an arranged date with IBM, that didn't work out.

The whole Sculley interview is worth the read, and he comes across as remarkably open and even magnanimous to Steve Jobs (in both his incarnations). If anything, he omits some of his own positive impact: The company would have died in the late 80s without the 'Open Mac' transition, which he fostered. But his reflections on the 'design thing' are right on target: The best way to sell John, or to get your project on stage with him was the 'big vision', a clear assertion of a direction and what Apple would do for a new set of users, no matter how half-baked your first version might be. For both better and worse, the shadow of Steve Jobs hung over Sculley for his entire tenure.

He's also on target in saying that his lack of technical background left him disarmed against both internal and external engineering controversies. As an example, much of impetus for the famed Pink vs. Blue schism (that led to both Taligent and the equally disastrous Copland) came from an internal engineering report that the existing MacOS was so entwined with the Mac hardware that it was impossible to either port it to an Intel platform, or to 'jack it up' and insert a real multi-tasking operating system kernel. The latter assertion was given the lie when the A/UX team did exactly that, showing that it was a hard and ugly task, but not infeasible. John may never have known about it, and certain never understood the implications, and so ran without knowledge of another set of strategic options that might have been available.

October 13, 2010

Is the a reason for adding new functionality to a perfectly good app (or website), other than providing something for marketing to tweet or write press releases about? As it turns out, yes, and it hinges on the economic concept of transaction costs, in this case a user's time and monetary costs of searching for, understanding, and perhaps purchasing the new bit of behavior rather than finding it to hand (albeit perhaps less well implemented) in an already familiar setting.

If it comes off, this deal is going to be a tightrope walk. Private equity has not had a lot of luck with legacy media - witness Sam Zell's disastrous acquisition of the Tribune. AOL and Yahoo haven't quite drifted into the legacy category yet, but they are both fallen stars trying to retrench from broken business models. There will be some ruthless slashing to get down to a coherent and possibly profitable core, and those doing the cutting won't have home addresses in Silicon Valley. Look for more pain at the offices out by the Baylands.

October 11, 2010

Back in the spring, driving home at dusk along 280, I noticed a Prius up ahead with a curious spinning truncated cone on its roof. From my experiences at the DARPA Urban Challenge I knew I was looking at a lidar range finder, often used on robotic vehicles. Intrigued, I pulled up alongside and could see a glowing LCD panel mounted in the passenger seat. I could tell that there was someone in the driver's seat (phew!) but not what he or she might be doing.

At the time I guessed this was a calibration run for another vehicle from the Stanford Center for Automotive Research. But it seems that what I saw was identical to a car video'ed by Robert Scoble (it even looks like 280 on his vid) and since identified as one of Google's self-driving cars. Less than three years from a set of rather twitchy military-funded demostration projects to something that was doing at least as well as the average Silicon Valley commuter (and was presumably signed off by Google's attorneys). A decent learning curve!

From a technologist's point of view, this is of course awesome and great fun. From an investor's POV, I'm left scratching my head a little. Some of Google's seeming digressions, such as Chrome and Android, actually make a lot of sense. They're about making sure that Google's end user touch points won't be compromised by closed networks or proprietary software. Jumping clear over telematics and into robotics is a bit of a stretch, though, along many dimensions: product cycle, capital requirements, channels and regulation, to name but a few.

The other possibility is that there is NO business plan. Perhaps what we're seeing is the result of the biggest cabal of Google engineers ever, using their 20% innovation time to pull off a state-of-the-art robotics project right under the eyes and flapping ears of Silicon Valley's pundits. Which would be doubly cool, and a sign that Google is assuming one of the social roles of companies with (near) monopoly margins over time, sponsoring open ended research. Shades of Bell Labs back in the day, minus the centralized planning?

June 16, 2010

Back in 2007, I took note of the BumpTop animated desktop replacement interface, which takes advantage of modern machines' 3D graphics capabilities to provide an even more realistic interpretation of manipulating information. I contrasted BumpTop's literal interface to a more 'magical' approach, where user and machine actions have no 'real world' parallels. I picked Google as an exemplar of this style, where entering the right 'magic words' can cause information from anywhere in the world to appear; algorithm, not metaphor, has been the root of Google's fantastic success.

So while I'm off on vacation, Google up and buys BumpTop, and withdraws its product from the market. Most of the press and blog coverage, as with the linked article, have focused on the possibility that Google will use BumpTop as a come-back to Apple and other's multi-touch interfaces for pad and smartphone formats. As a competitive posture, it makes some sense, though I'll have to note that the sort of 3D graphical tricks that make BumpTop so appealing comes at a significant cost in processor cycles, which doesn't do anything good for battery life. For that matter, picking up a staff of expert UI designers accustomed to dealing with dynamic displays, in comparison to the usual browser straight-jacket in which Google's designers have had to work, also makes sense.

But I'm intrigued by another possibility, that Google will take an approach hinted at in my prior post, of using its algorithmic prowess to add magic to the literal world of BumpTop. Direct manipulation interfaces have the weakness of requiring user action for every change of state, which has inherent scaling problems when faced with a whole web or cloud of information, most of it unseen and unknown by the user. It's over twenty years since anyone pushed down the path of 'more magic', where the machine collaborates with the user in interpreting interface gestures and words, applying the results to very large information or social spaces. Google's ability to exploit its acquisitions has been extremely erratic in the past, but I hope they aren't overlooking this possibility.

June 04, 2010

For a successful launch to orbit, on the first try, of their Falcon9 clustered engine vehicle. YouTube'd here. (Unofficial video, with background sound and buffer jumps. Will link to official vid when available.)

April 08, 2010

(This blog has been suffering its usual fate during California's spring. Neglect, that is. I've been out putting some miles on my hiking boots, thereby completing my rehab from getting the metal out of my leg. I'll try to unload a few things from the blogging queue before heading East to Virginia for vacation in a couple of weeks.)

Unlike other developed nations, America is still growing its population, and this is a good thing if we take advantage of it.

The suburbs and exurbs are alive and well, will continue to prosper from the growing population, and are shifting from strictly bedroom communities to multi-faceted hubs in their own right.

There is little sign of an aging population moving back to the urban cores.

Locales that welcome development are growing and prospering, while those with regulatory land rationing stagnate.

The American Heartland may be poised for a resurgence, due to overall population growth coupled with regulatory ossification of the coastal states.

Race is diminishing as a factor in American life, while class and social mobility remain important.

The biggest challenge facing America is finding work for the growing population which permits class mobility, while retaining the benefits of healthy seniors who wish to continue to work. The biggest threats to that future are centralized planning and overcommitment to foreign adventures.

If you're a believer in American exceptionalism, this is all good red meat. If you're an adherent of the 'New Urbanist" school, you'll hate it. What makes this book worth having, even if you've already ingested Kotkin's ideas elsewhere, is his exhaustive footnoting of analysis and forecasts, including both primary demographic and other data, and more accessible secondary sources. That's a luxury tough to fit into the blog post or opinion column formats, and if you're doing your own analysis, you'll almost certainly find something new in Kotkin's massive bibliography.

This also serves to highlight another valuable distinction of Kotkin: His work is largely descriptive and evidence based, grounded in both demographic fate and observable aggregate behaviors of people, rather than polls and theories. When he uses 'is' or 'will be', he's earned that formulation by observation. Contrast the futurist schools whose works are studded with 'should' and 'must', and are willing to lend their credibility to those who would use coercion to make it come out their way. (I consider it highly ironic that while 'progressives' of a century ago agitated to get the working classes out of tenements, those with the same label today seem determined to put them back there.)

Kotkin builds his theses of (sub)urbanism, ethnic blending, class, and Heartland resurgence brick by brick. In the his final chapter, titled the same as the book, he both sums up and inevitably ventures into politically-freighted territory. While he's no friend to GWB-style interventionism, and repeatedly cites the election of Obama as a positive in the decline of race consciousness, his conclusions on demographic outcomes, and what can be done to benefit from continuing American growth, are all at odds with the instincts and policies of the current administration, and the nanny-state Democrat majorities in DC and Sacramento.

March 11, 2010

I checked, it's not April 1st. This report on a use of prehistoric mollusk shells to estimate temperatures appears to be genuine. With a worldwide sample size of 26 such shells, it's not going to change science overnight, but it could prove informative in time. It also has multiple linguistic possibilities, leading to the informative but punishing comment thread on the post. Bonus points for the "shopped" illo, at least for those who follow AGW insider ball.

Waiting for VCs, or DHS, to knock. Outside of the probably excessive attention being paid to the amateur DIYBio movement, there are some serious folks working in minimal facilities. Rob Carlson documents one such, in an undisclosed garage in Silicon Valley. Whoever is behind it is attempting serious work - anti-cancer compound screening - but is lying low due in part to credible fears - documented by Carlson - of finding not venture capitalists but armed agents from DHS at their doors. There are legitimate issues of WMD proliferation here - Carlson himself has credibly proposed micro-brewing as a reasonable comparable to the potential scope and scale of low-rent bio-production. But an uncoordinated, antagonistic approach by bureaucrats toting guns is not going to lead to any sort of containment. It's more likely to cause the same swift proliferation of enabling knowledge as that sparked by the misguided Federal policies on cryptographic technology in the '90s.

The thug in the mouse suit. Back as far as the 60s, there's been a feeling that ugliness sometimes lurks behind the squeaky-clean, family-oriented facade at Disney. Maggie's Farm documents some of the recent questionable deeds of the mouse. You can choose from using the Federal government to extract fees from foreign visitors to help promote Disney parks, to suppressing politically uncomfortable content about 9/11, to getting a non-profit that exposed an ineffective Disney education product thrown out of its offices. And of course we all know about the 'copyright event horizon', ensuring that nothing created since the first appearance of Mickey will ever go out of copyright.

Here I should mention that sfgate.com is apparently - by admission of the author - within the letter of her contract by making this use of her work. That relationship, now terminated, was based on a level of trust that she feels has been abused, and made no explicit stipulations on how the content can be reused. The interest here is what this incident may say about the ongoing behavior of the MSM online, and its implications for the industry's business model.

This occurrence is not a one-off. The Violet Blue post also mentions the LA Times as creating similar ad-stuffed dead end pages, also with a list of multiple aliased domains. What caught my attention was that both the Chron's and Times' alias lists incuded subdomains of one common domain: perfectmarket.com. Perfect Market is an LA-area startup that claims to:

[help] newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters with a web presence and other online publishers grow their revenue with little effort and no risk. Our proprietary technology solution better fulfills the needs of intent users – people who arrive at their sites through keyword searches seeking specific information – with exactly what they're looking for in our customers' online content. Optimized content with relevant ads generates higher click-through rates for advertisers, and dramatically more revenue for publishers and their ad network partners.

That glowing description does seem to fit the prosaic implementation discovered by Ms. Blue, so it seems safe to conclude that Perfect Market is the technology and services partner that assisted the Chron and Times in stripping the original content into its SEO'd counterparts.

Perfect Market is a well backed venture. It has raised over $20m in venture capital, the most recent round closing in February and announced yesterday. Interestingly, this round was led by the bankrupt Tribune Company, parent company of the LA Times. Perfect Market also has solid backing from more traditional VCs, including Trinity, Rustic Canyon and IdeaLab. (Mayfield also has a board seat, though no publicized investment.)

Again, nothing to see here from a legal perspective. The company is selling a service and technology to its MSM clients, who bear responsibility for its operation against content that they have bought or licensed.

There are three business perspectives that do emerge. The first is the potential reaction of authors who find their work used in this fashion, and the consequent ability of MSM sites to work with those with an established byline. Ms. Blue has pretty much covered that by example, so I will pass.

The second is the reaction of the so-far-unnamed party to the transaction: the search engine. The keyword and ad-stuffed dead end pages apparently produced by Perfect Markets's technology are isomorphic, from a search company's point of view, to those created by more questionable tactics such as scraping. The intent is the same: to spam the index. This is the behavior that routinely gets questionable sites shoved to Google's back pages, or banished altogether. One has to wonder just how long this type of abuse will be tolerated, simply because it's being practiced by a recognized media outlet. (And we can note in passing that the irony of an MSM that routinely suggests that deep links are 'stealing' behaving in this fashion is thick enough to spread on toast.)

Finally come the implications for the businesses of the MSM sites themselves. While Perfect Market suggests that what they are enabling is an exhibit of MSM brand power, reality would seem to be the opposite. It should be clear that neither the potential reader nor the original author are going to be happy with the existence of a keyword stuffed, link stripped dead end page. The difference between these pages and those of a more prosaic SEO spammer is simply the brand attached to them, which might entice the reader to click through. It should be clear that the Chron, the Times, and other MSM outlets behaving in this fashion are doing no less than milking their brands to the detriment of long term trust and value. It is a subtle, but telling, exhibition of their desperation.

It looks like LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinal, South Florida Sun Sentinal, Hartford Courant, Allentown Morning Call, Virginia Daily Press and the New York Daily News are all using this or looking to.

March 03, 2010

You know, at some point there has to be parity. There has to be parity between what is happening in the real world, and what is happening in the public sector world. The money does not grow on trees outside this building or outside your municipal building. It comes from the hard working people of our communities who are suffering and are hurting right now....

We need to understand we are all in this together. And you know, all of you know in your heart, what I am saying is true. You all know that these raises that are being given to public employees of all stripes, we cannot afford. You all know the state cannot continue to spend money it does not have. And you all know that the appetite for tax increases among our constituents has come to an end.

Yes. When the average wage in the private and public sectors are once again in line (and the unemployment rates ditto), then 'justice' will be served.